There are many businesses today which utilize envelope inserting apparatus to mail their customers bills or periodic statements. Envelope inserting apparatus is well known and essentially employs bursting apparatus and/or cutting devices, folding apparatus, feeders and conveying devices to assemble a collation of documents and feed the document collation to an inserting station where the collation is inserted into a waiting envelope. The envelope is then closed and sealed and printed with an appropriate amount of postage.
With the emergence of the "information superhighway", many customers today prefer to receive their bills and statements in electronic form on their computers, such as through e-mail. The production mailers sending out the bills and statements can benefit from electronic transmission of bills and statements because delivery can be more timely and the cost of delivery can be significantly reduced relative to delivery of hard copy of bills and statements.
With the advent of this electronic technology, it is now commonplace for a document generation system to incorporate both a physical system for generating physical mailpieces with an electronic system for generating electronic mailpieces to be electronically sent to a recipient. In the prior art, when coupling both systems to a central database, the database could only create a status report for a job running on both systems only when that job first appeared on a predefined sub-system (e.g., a document inserter). If for some reason that job did not first appear on the designated sub-system, the central database was unable to create a status report for the job when it appeared first on any other sub-system (e.g., an electronic web server).
Thus, it is a object of the present invention to overcome this noted shortcoming of the prior art for creating status reports on document generation systems having a plurality of sub-systems coupled to a central database.